Eyes Wide Open
by Shimmertail
Summary: The battle is almost won, and Caroline's friends are finally free of the dark shadow that Klaus had been in their lives. Caroline herself, however, can't shake the Original so easily.


She buried her face into the pillow, inhaling the scent of the clean cotton as she tried to escape the sunlight streaming in through her window. A tiny sigh escaped her, full of quiet dread for the day ahead of her. Didn't she deserve one day off from the chaos of Mystic Falls? The sheets and covers had wrapped around her during the night as she'd tossed and turned, tangling together to trap her in the bed. It was so tempting just to let them keep her there... She sighed again and stretched like a cat, her eyes still closed in the half-remembered bliss that comes in the moments between dream and reality.

She felt an arm tighten around her waist, and a small smile traced its way across her face. Another surprise. She ran her fingers down his arm, catching his hand as she leaned back into his warm chest. The long fingers intertwined with hers, and she felt his other hand brush a flyaway curl out of her face.

"Did you know you're most beautiful when you're asleep," a silky voice murmured close to her ear. "You're so relaxed and carefree, not trying to impress anyone—it's enchanting." His lips brushed against the top of her head, and she knew then that there was something off, something wrong about it. It was too perfect, too serene to actually be happening. She was Caroline Forbes, and she didn't get to just have lazy mornings when there were crazy vampire vampire hunters running around.

He exhaled slowly, and she smothered a sleepy giggle as his breath tickled her ear. "I suppose that's what I get for trying to make things nice," he said quietly, an ironic edge creeping into his voice that set her on edge. That was too familiar. Not here, not now. "You always were too clever for your own good, Caroline."

Her eyes opened, blinking away the grogginess as she tried to focus. She was in her room, but things were...different. Colors seemed too bright, the outlines of objects unnaturally sharp and clear. She twisted, trying to look at him as the fuzziness in her vision faded. "Ty—?" she mumbled.

He stopped her cold, a hand landing on her shoulder as he attempted to turn her away from him. "Don't," he whispered, and the desperation in his voice set the alarm bells ringing in the young vampire's head. "Go back to sleep, Caroline. Please don't ruin everything, sweetheart."

Caroline's eyes widened, and she almost fell out of the bed in her haste to get away from the warm arms, the snug embrace, the soft voice and sharp accent. She backed herself into the corner of her room closest to the door before she turned to him. "Don't touch me," she hissed through gritted teeth. "Don't ever touch me again."

"Caroline," he said once, beseechingly. Her eyes turned to his face, and she immediately wished that they hadn't.

His skin was an ashen, sickly gray that only emphasized the dark blue veins visible beneath his skin. Even his eyes had lost their gleam, a dull color more gray than blue. They watched her unblinkingly, unnaturally wide. He lay stretched across her bed propped up with an elbow, fully dressed in the clothes she remembered from the last time she had seen him. A large scarlet stain had bloomed over a rip in his shirt, still glistening wetly in the early morning sunlight. The impossible brightness and clarity of the dream—hallucination?—made it almost painful to glance at the fresh blood. She turned her eyes down after a moment, still aware of the way his not-quite-blue gaze followed her. There was pain there, pain she didn't want to see or care about.

Klaus closed his eyes for a long moment and nodded. "I won't touch you unless you want me to, love," he replied, a hint of sarcasm in his tone. "Now, will you please come out of the corner?"

"Why should I do anything you ask?" she retorted harshly. "Have you ever given me a reason to? I've watched you murder and kidnap and plot against my friends ever since you came to Mystic Falls. You've tried to kill everyone I care about, Klaus. Why should I come out of here?"

"Because I've saved everyone you care about a few times too. Including you, Caroline. Mustn't forget that part."

She could hear the anger in his voice. Yes, Caroline had expected that. What caught her off-guard was the weariness to his words, the defeat and exhaustion. She looked at the Original again, avoiding his unblinking eyes, and saw what his voice made clear. The vampire everyone had feared for so long, the ultimate killer before Alaric, was tired. Whatever he really was, this postmortem version of Niklaus was only a shadow of his former self in this too-bright world.

After a moment of hesitation, she stepped out of the corner and sat down on the edge of the bed farthest away from him. "What do you want?" she asked. "You're dead. You're not supposed to be here."

A slight smile curved the Original's lips. "Forget what I said earlier. You're beautiful when you sleep, but you're absolutely stunning when you're angry." A pencil already in hand, he reached over to her bedside table and picked up a notebook that hadn't been there when Caroline had fallen asleep. "As for what I want, I thought I'd made that rather clear to you by now. And I always seem to turn up where I'm not supposed to be, don't I?"

Suppressing the urge to argue, Caroline moved on to her next question. "How are you here? Is this a dream?"

Klaus nodded, not looking up from the page. "Of a sort, sweetheart. I am, as you pointed out, dead for all intents and purposes. This dream is your room the way I remember it. The little oddities you noticed are some of the many side effects of being an Original. We see things a bit differently." He motioned to her face. "Could you move that bit of hair hanging over your eye? It's hard enough to get them right as it is."

"Then why does everything feel so real?" she asked, tucking the strand of blonde hair behind her ear. She pushed down on the bed and heard the soft creak of the mattress springs, inaudible to most humans. "I can feel the sun, the floor, _you_."

Klaus chuckled, his eyes flickering up to her face before returning to the page. "I've had a lot of practice over the years." Pencil hovering just above the thin paper of the notebook, he looked up at her again, his eyes locking into hers with that intensity she had never gotten used to. She looked into them for a moment, a hollow, washed-out imitation of the bright blue she remembered, before closing her eyes. His sigh reached her ears, and she only opened her eyes again when she heard the the muffled scratching of pencil on paper resume.

"As for how I am here, that's a tricky question," Klaus said, eying the notebook critically. "I didn't go over to the Other Side when I died because I don't belong there. Not now, and not ever." The sunlight beamed down on him, throwing the dark veins that crisscrossed his pale skin in sharp relief. Caroline had seen Klaus at his best and his worst, but this was the first time the word _inhuman_ had ever fit him.

"Why are you here, Klaus?" she asked softly. Her heart thudded in her chest, and she wondered if he could hear how fast it was beating.

He looked up, a smirk flashing across his face. "Well, I would've put you in _my _room, but I didn't think you would have taken that as well."

Caroline scowled and shot him the patented Caroline Forbes Glare. "That's not what I asked. Why are you here with me? Why do you keep following me? You could have tortured anyone else tonight, but you came here. Why?"

She watched as he tensed abruptly, his grip on the pencil growing tighter as ever muscle in his body seemed to coil in preparation for an attack. Just as Caroline began to brace herself for the onslaught she was expecting, the fight left him. He sat up, notebook resting in his lap. "Torture? That seems a bit harsh, sweetheart. I haven't done anything to hurt you."

"Then why are you here?" she persisted, almost ready to throw up her hands in exasperation or stomp her foot like a little girl having a temper tantrum.

He looked up from the paper then, his washed-out gaze seeking hers. "You mean you don't know?" he asked, and the forlorn lilt to his words stopped her cold. She looked at him then, really looked at him. She glanced over the ashen skin and the inky veins that branched out from his eyes and crawled down his neck. She looked past the poor facsimile of himself that Klaus had become in death and saw what was hidden beneath the crimson stain and dull, not-quite-blue eyes.

"Klaus..." she began tentatively, wondering what she was about to say. He cut her off, though, by standing and ripping out on of the pages in the notebook. Folding it over so that nothing showed, he walked over to her desk and tucked it in between two of her textbooks.

"I have to go now, sweetheart," he said, not looking at her as he placed the notebook back on her bedside table. "You'll be waking up soon. Remember to watch out for Alaric; I won't be there to save you this time." He paused, standing beside her for a moment before he crouched down beside her. Caroline froze, a deer in the headlights.

He stopped when their faces were level with each other. He remained silent for a long moment before turning his head. He looked at her, eyes narrowed with such intensity that she was afraid to move. He sighed softly and leaned forward, his stubble scratching against her cheek as his lips brushed her ear. "Stay bright, sweetheart," he murmured. The Original stood slowly, and Caroline watched the dream dissolve to black before her eyes.

Caroline opened her eyes, taking a few deep steadying breaths as she sat up in the pitch-darkness of her bedroom. She glanced over to her window, and nothing but the starry night sky greeted her. She scowled, running a hand through her blonde hair as she reached for her phone. She turned it on, shining the light into the darkest corners of her room. She _certainly_ wasn't checking for blonde Originals though._ Certainly not._

Her light, and eyes, inevitably fell to the bedside table. No notebook. She rolled over to the right side of the bed, the side she never slept on, and found the sheets and pillow cold. After a moment of hesitation, she climbed out of bed, escaping the twisted sheets with a little difficulty, and walked over to her desk nestled in the corner of the room. Her textbooks lay just as they had in the dream, although they were duller under the light of her phone's screen. She stopped dead in her tracks when she saw what was trapped between her English and History books.

A sheet of paper, folded once so nothing was visible on the outside.

Holding her breath, she set her phone aside and picked up the History book like it was a bomb ready to explode. It was odd how it felt in her hands, a hundred times heavier than it should have been. In the back of her mind, Caroline knew she was being ridiculous as she paused for a moment, hesitating. _Scared, sweetheart? _something in the back of her mind whispered.

Her grip on the book tightened as she picked up the paper. _Never, _she thought, just to spite him. The blonde could almost hear his sardonic chuckle that would have followed her retort. Putting the textbook back in its place, she carried the paper and the phone back over to the bed.

Sitting down quietly on the edge of the bed, Caroline bit her lip as she readjusted her grip on the phone. The light shined down directly on the folded sheet of drawing paper. Carefully she opened the paper.

As the light flooded over the image, she relaxed as she recognized the drawing of the horse and herself. She frowned slightly as she glanced over at the desk again. The blonde didn't recall leaving the drawing there. Her eyes fell back to the paper she held so carefully in her hands, brushing her thumb over the drawing.

There were little things there, things she hadn't noticed about it before. The gleam in the horse's eye. The elegant curve of the lines. The casually messy spikes of his handwriting. The faint fingerprint that had been left in pencil lead near the top of the page. The words _genuine beauty _sprang to mind, but she quickly banished them. She couldn't be thinking like that, not now that he was haunting her or whatever he was actually doing.

Folding the paper back carefully, she turned her phone off and sat it down on the table. Caroline was enveloped in darkness again, and the longing for morning sunshine hit her like a punch in the stomach.

Caroline slipped under the covers again, the drawing still in hand. Instead of rolling back over to the left side like always, she lingered on the right side. She nestled into the cold sheets on that side, tugging the covers up to her chin with one hand. The blonde held the drawing in her hand for another moment before sliding it under the pillow.

She curled up like a cat, yawning as she rested her head on the pillow. Her eyes fluttered closed, even though she was still very much awake. Heavy silence filled her ears, nothing and everything all at once.

"I appreciate your...," _Obsession, malice, manipulation, apathy, temper, stubbornness, arrogance, ability to be a complete monster and still inspire sympathy, _"determination," she finished after a moment of thought.

She could almost hear his laughter.

Caroline reached under the pillow, her fingertips finding the edges of the paper. She relaxed as she let them rest there, snuggling deeper into the sheets that had begun to warm.

Sleep did not visit her again that night.

Neither did he.


End file.
